Caught (Missing) (12 page)

Quiet?
Jonah thought.

Mileva had stopped shrieking.

She was staring straight at Emily, her eyes burning with intensity.

“You look . . . a little like Albert,” Mileva said softly. “Around the mouth. And maybe the nose. And . . .” She laid her hand gently on Emily’s head. “Your hair is just like mine was at your age.” She turned back to Jonah and Katherine. “How? She survived the scarlet fever and then . . . how could this even be possible?”

“You believe it?” Katherine asked incredulously.

“Is this any more incredible than invisibility? Or my child, who is too ill to walk, vanishing from my side in the blink of an eye?” Mileva asked. “Or than scientists saying the whole universe is bathed in an invisible ether, which light flows through?”

“Is that a yes or a no?” Jonah asked.

Mileva made a sound that might have been a chuckle, if she hadn’t looked so serious.

“Let’s just say that I am suspending disbelief until I hear all the explanations,” she said. “I will listen with an open mind.”

Jonah and Katherine both opened their mouths. Then, just as quickly, they both shut them.

“Well?” Mileva asked, narrowing her eyes. “Explain.”

“I think,” Emily said slowly, “this is such a strange situation, we are all trying to figure it out. To figure out
how
to explain.”

Mileva looked back at Emily again, seeming to drink in the sight of her.

“She can even speak—was that
English
?” Mileva asked.

Jonah realized that Emily hadn’t gotten the translation vaccines that eliminated language problems for him and Katherine. He hadn’t really bothered to think about how many languages and dialects they’d managed to
understand since they’d started following Mileva across Europe. He’d barely noticed that they’d been talking with Mileva in German all along. But that would explain part of the reason that Emily kept looking at them with such a dazed expression.

“I only know as much Serbian as Lieserl would have, at eighteen months,” Emily explained apologetically. “But I do know some German from school. I just don’t speak it very well.”

Somehow, she’d managed to switch into German to say that.

“My daughter heard little but Serbian from my family. But—German school?” Mileva asked, looking puzzled all over again. “Where—?”

“Oh, brother,” Jonah muttered, because this added a whole other layer of complications to explain.

Mileva seemed to have decided to focus on the emotion of the moment, rather than the explanations. She reached out to touch Emily’s cheek.

“To think that I agonized over missing so much of your first year and a half,” Mileva murmured. “Your first tooth, your first step, your first word . . . This is better than losing you entirely, but—how much more have I missed? How old are you?”

“Thirteen,” Emily said softly.

“Thirteen,” Mileva repeated. “Another eleven and a half years gone . . .” Alarm broke over her face. “Did that much time pass somehow while I thought I spent only moments out in these woods?” She glanced quickly back at Jonah and Katherine. “The two of you did not seem to age, but you are strange beings, perhaps not subject to the rules of time . . .” Her panic seemed to grow. She pressed her hands to her own face in dismay. “Did eleven and a half years pass for the whole rest of the world while I was here? Have I been away from my family that long? Away from my Albert?”

Jonah saw that she was working out a Rip van Winkle–type theory to explain Emily’s appearance. He couldn’t let her keep thinking that.

“No,” he assured. “Eleven and a half years didn’t pass for anyone but, uh, Lieserl. And that’s not exactly the right explanation about her but, uh, it’s close enough. Just don’t worry. It’s still nineteen-oh . . .” He realized he still didn’t know exactly which year they were in. “You know,” he said. “It’s still the same year it was when we left your parents’ house and walked out here. It’s still the same day.”

“It’s 1903, then,” Mileva said, peering at him closely. “It’s still 1903, right?”

Something bothered him about that date, but he didn’t have time to analyze it. He concentrated on looking
truthful and honest and trustworthy as he gazed back at Mileva and said, “Right.”

“Then . . . ,” Mileva said, her gaze jerking back to Emily once more. “This might make things easier. You can come back to Switzerland and live with me and Albert, and no one would ever suspect. . . . We can say you’re a different relative. A cousin, a niece . . .”

“Um, well, that’s not quite . . . ,” Jonah began. How did you tell someone that living with her own daughter would probably ruin time forever?

“Don’t worry,” Mileva said. “If you can’t figure out how to explain any of this, Albert can. He’ll understand it.”

“No!” Jonah and Katherine said together.

“You can’t tell any of this to Albert Einstein!” Jonah added for emphasis.

“But—he is my husband,” Mileva said. “How could I keep this secret? About our own child?”

“He’s too important,” Jonah tried to explain.

Mileva’s expression soured.

“You’re someone else who believes that everything must be sacrificed for the good of a
man
?” she asked. “Even his own daughter?”

Jonah squinted at her. That wasn’t what he’d been saying. Was she calling him sexist or something? Did she think he meant it was just because Einstein was male?

“No, I—,” Jonah began. He shook his head. With that motion and his narrowed eyes, the glow of the Lieserl tracer on the ground seemed to intensify. Was she getting better?

No, wait,
Jonah thought.
I’m not just seeing Lieserl’s tracer. I’m seeing Mileva’s, too, bent over her.

Mileva’s tracer was gathering her daughter into her arms. She held the child tightly against her chest and rocked back and forth. She had her head tilted back, tears streaming down her face. Though Jonah couldn’t hear a sound, he could tell that the tracer was sobbing and wailing and screaming at the top of her lungs.

Oh, no,
Jonah thought.
Oh, no. Did Lieserl’s tracer just die?

No—that wasn’t it. The glow of Lieserl’s tracer was dim, but it was still there. And the tracer child was moving its arms and feebly turning its head and—however soundlessly—crying along with its mother.

Jonah turned back to the real, flesh-and-blood Mileva.

“You came out here just to lure me and Katherine away from the house and bargain with us in private, right?” he asked her.

“Uh, right,” she said, puzzled all over again.

Now Jonah turned to Katherine.

“So why are we seeing tracers?” he asked.

“I guess the tracers must mean that Mileva would have brought Lieserl out here even if we hadn’t been around,” Katherine said slowly. “But—why?”

“What are you two talking about?” Emily asked.

Jonah remembered that this was Emily’s first trip to the past, and so far she’d spent almost all of it as a deathly ill toddler. He glanced at Mileva, then switched to English to explain.

“Tracers—those glowing versions of Lieserl and Mileva—they show what people would have been doing if no time travelers had intervened,” he said. “So what else would Mileva have come here for, besides talking to us?”

“That tracer person—she was reading a letter to her little girl a minute ago,” Emily said.

Jonah guessed that Emily must have inherited her mother’s powers of observation rather than her father’s.
Jonah himself certainly hadn’t noticed such a tiny detail in the midst of real people yelling and jumping around and, oh yeah, meeting a barely recognizable daughter under very odd circumstances. But the Mileva tracer was indeed clutching a tracer letter against her child’s back. A tracer envelope lay crumpled on the ground.

“That’s Albert Einstein’s handwriting, isn’t it?” Katherine asked, glancing at it.

The real Mileva opened her mouth, and Jonah could tell that she was about to complain about them speaking English, which she didn’t understand. She was looking as if she didn’t trust them again.

“Did you just get a letter from your husband?” Jonah asked her, switching back to German.

“Yes, the maid brought it to me when the doctor left,” Mileva said. “It’s right here in my pocket.” She patted her skirt, and for the first time Jonah noticed the white edge of an envelope sticking out slightly. “I haven’t read it yet. I was saving it. I think my husband will be happy. I’d just told him that I—”

Just then Jonah heard a shout from the direction of the road.

“Mileva! Mileva, where are you?”

“That’s my father,” Mileva said. She glanced around quickly, as if to remind herself that Jonah and Katherine—and Emily—were fully visible right now, and could easily
be discovered. She looked down at the Elucidator still clutched in her hand, then shook her head. She seemed to be deciding that she didn’t want to make them invisible again. Maybe she just didn’t think she had time for that.

“I’ll go send him away,” she said, struggling to her feet. “All of you—hide!” Her eyes lingered on Emily. “As much as he’d love to see you . . .” She stepped away, holding out the Elucidator for a moment as if to remind them that she still had something they wanted, and they couldn’t just run away.

Jonah saw a tracer version of Mileva’s father rushing toward them, arriving much faster than the actual man.

So in original time he must have heard Mileva wailing. Something in that letter made her cry so hard he heard her from the roadside.

Mileva limped past Jonah, so close that the bottom of her skirt brushed his ankles. Jonah thought about grabbing the Elucidator from her hands and demanding to be made invisible again. But Mileva would undoubtedly start screaming and fighting against him—he couldn’t risk causing such a huge disturbance with Mileva’s father so close by.

Maybe there’s something else I can do,
he thought.
Not about the invisibility, but . . .

He inched his hand out, below her line of view.

It wasn’t the Elucidator he was reaching for.

It was the letter.

Jonah closed his fingers over the corner of the letter that showed at the edge of Mileva’s pocket. He drew his hand back—slowly, slowly . . .

This was like pick-up sticks or Kerplunk or Jenga—one of those little-kid games where you had to take what you wanted without making the whole game collapse.

She’s going to turn around,
Jonah thought.
I’ll have to make up some lie about just catching the letter when I saw it falling out of her pocket.

But Mileva didn’t turn around. She took the next step, putting a huge space between her and Jonah. And then she just kept rushing on, scurrying toward her father’s shouting.

But Katherine and Emily both saw what Jonah had done. They gaped at him, horrified once more.

“Jonah!” Katherine exclaimed. “When she finds out that you stole—”

“It’s just going to make her cry,” Jonah said, pointing at the sobbing tracer Mileva. The tracer version of her father huddled over her, trying to comfort her.

Katherine frowned, but didn’t say anything else as all three kids crouched down behind the downed log, hiding from the real version of Mileva’s father and anyone else who might approach from the road. Once they were in a safe position, Katherine yanked the letter from Jonah’s fingers.

“Let me see that,” she said. “Since you’re going to get us in trouble anyhow, we might as well read it.”

Jonah could tell she was dying of curiosity.

“Read it out loud, so we can all hear,” Jonah said. He flipped over onto his stomach so he could see over the log. That way he could watch for Mileva or her father coming close even as he listened to Katherine. She had the letter out of the envelope and was unfolding it.

“‘Dear Dollie,’” she began in a whisper. Dimly, Jonah realized she was translating it into English as she read, for Emily’s benefit. Katherine looked up and explained to Emily, “He means Mileva. She and Albert call each other these silly pet names—it’s going to be way embarrassing if they’re still doing that when their kids are teenagers.”

“Katherine!” Jonah said. “Their kid
is
a teenager now! Emily!”

“Oh, right. Sorry,” Katherine said.

“Never mind,” Emily said. “I feel like . . . Do you really think we should be reading her mail?”

“Yes,” Jonah and Katherine said together.

“But—it’s private,” Emily objected. “Personal.”

Jonah wondered if maybe she was a little too nice to cope with time travel. He wondered how she’d survived middle school back home.

“Yeah, well, the fate of the world could depend on us knowing what’s in that letter,” Jonah said.

He expected Katherine to roll her eyes and tell Emily,
See how full of it my brother is?
The fact that neither girl challenged him made him feel even worse about their situation.

Katherine went back to reading out loud.

“‘I’m not the least bit angry that poor Dollie is hatching a new chick,’” she continued in a hushed voice. She’d adopted a bit of a German accent to imitate Albert’s voice. “‘In fact, I’m happy about it and had already given some thought to whether I shouldn’t see to it that you get a new Lieserl. After all, you shouldn’t be denied that which is the right of all women. Don’t worry about it, and come back content. Brood on it very carefully so that something good will come of it.’”

Katherine almost dropped the letter.

“Is he for real?” she muttered.

“Hold on, hold on—‘hatching a new chick’? Getting ‘a new Lieserl’?” Jonah asked. “Does he mean Mileva’s going to have another baby?”

“I bet that’s what she’d just told Albert. And that’s why she kept throwing up on the way here,” Katherine said. “She’s pregnant.”

“She threw up by my bedside, too,” Emily said thoughtfully. “I remember thinking, as Lieserl, ‘Mama sick too? Mama sick too?’”

Jonah shot her a puzzled look.

“Look, you try thinking with the brain and vocabulary of a toddler,” Emily said. “It’s not easy.”